The Janus Face of the Liberal Information Order

• In Event: Contesting the Liberal International Order: Economics, Information, Institutions

Abstract

The liberal international order is undergoing attacks that leverage digital communication networks. It is ironic that open communication networks such as the Internet are being used to undermine the international liberal order, since such networks were previously thought to support – and indeed extend – that order. The existing literature has tended to think of the international liberal order as a relatively seamless construct, in which international institutions, open flows of goods, money and information, and domestic liberalism were mutually reinforcing. Our paper shows how the open flows of digital communication that were supposed to help knit the international liberal order together instead became a vector of attack on domestic liberalism. The standard liberal nostrum is that the best antidote to bad speech is more speech: what illiberal states have discovered is that the best antidote to more speech is more bad speech. We use historical institutionalism to show how distributed communication technologies such as the Internet interacted with different domestic political configurations over three phases of interaction. First, early choices over the governance of global digital networks led to an international communications order that was apparently liberal and highly decentralized but also highly conflictual, creating a global information order in which both liberal and illiberal states had to co-exist – but where illiberal states believed themselves to be threatened by the order’s protection of open communications flows. This led to a second phase, in which illiberal states sought to insulate themselves from the order, using domestic institutions and digital networks to create structures that would defuse internal challenges, while experimenting with new methods such as friction and flooding to dissipate the energies of actors who might mobilize to constrain or even overturn domestic rulers. We are now currently in a third stage, where mutually reinforcing challenges from actors within liberal states and attackers from outside them are weakening the domestic foundations of liberalism. Flooding techniques that help promote stability in illiberal states can be turned to promote instability in liberal ones.

Authors

• Henry Farrell, George Washington University

• Abraham Newman, Georgetown University